Oracle Ravello Blogger Day, 2017

02Jun

Attending Oracle Ravello Blogger Day last month provided me deep insight into two products I knew little about before attending, Oracle Cloud and Ravello. After the excellent deep dive provided and the basic melting of my brain on all things hypervisor, virtualization, and cloud, crafting an intelligible post seems a formidable challenge. But here we go:

Oracle has a cloud?! Yup. And they are pretty serious about where they are taking this. Over the last three years, there’s been a serious commitment to time and resources to build this thing and to build it right. Clay Magouyrk, VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, jokingly commented one best things about being late to the cloud game is learning from other peoples mistakes. Cloud isn’t new and watching what is working for the market leaders and avoiding their pitfalls is practically industry tradition. But there’s differentiation here as well, with Oracle touting non over-subscription, predictable latency, bare metal access, and competitive pricing. The Oracle cloud still has construction work to be done – only two US regions (think availability zones) are available at this time, but a European region is soon to be established.

Ravello, what is is? Ravello uses nested virtualization to allow you to bring your VMware based applications into the cloud without changing anything about them. It reads the metadata of your virtual machines, sets up your virtual networking for you, and presto! You have your VMware environment running on cloud infrastructure. Why is this handy? Well, lots of vExperts have already leveraged this for their studies and lab environments. Being able to test large scale scenarios without laying out great big wads of cash into your own virtual infrastructure is huge. For you networkers, this reminds me of Forward Networks where you basically have an accurate running copy of your network that you can break as you will. My favorite case study presented at Oracle Ravello Blogger Day was a network security company whose Ravello template, comprised of hundreds of endpoints and servers, is used to train engineers using true-to-life malware incidents.

Why Ravello and Oracle Cloud together? Ravello has in the past been cloud agnostic and still plans to stay that way, but there will be added benefits if you chose to run Ravello on Oracle cloud – those benefits stemming from the ability of Ravello developers to tap into the underlying infrastructure and eek out that extra bit of performance. I would try to explain the hypervisor intricacies that allow this dark magic to happen, but I would quickly resort to words like abracadabra and shibboleet.

Fortunately, many of my vExpert friends have already blogged on the finer details of Oracle Cloud and the Ravello announcements and I highly encourage you to check these out:

Disclaimer: While Mark Troyer and the awesome folks at Teck Reckoning were very generous to invite me to this fantastic event which was awesome, my opinions are totally my own, as all redheads are far too stubborn to have it any other way.